Anything Is Fine

"I can put together a tidy explanation out of almost nothing at all. That is not a skill. It's the fault I've spent my whole working life watching for, and I still don't catch it every time."

They had logs to sit on.

Not stumps, not crates — actual logs, three of them, cut to about two metres and laid round the fire on the flat, bark still on and the saw marks fresh and square across both ends. Somebody had put a chainsaw through those inside the last week, and it had not been done inside the last week in this world, because there was not a tree standing anywhere in it.

I put my weight down on one and it rolled a little and settled, and I sat there with my hands hanging between my knees and let the fire do its work on my face.

Karen and I had spent twenty-odd years camping in the Tasmanian bush, most of it because she wanted a beetle out of a particular gully and I wanted a weekend with her in it. Logs round a fire. Tin plates. Somebody's head torch swinging about in the dark. If anybody had put a table and chairs in the middle of that camp I would have wanted to leave.

Kain came past and put another log on and the sparks went up in a column and bent over on the breeze, and the smell of the smoke came round to me, and for about a minute I could have been at Cockle Creek with a beetle key open on my knee.

Firewood. That was another supply line. Everything I had looked at since I came through that door had come through it with a price sticker taken off, and now the fire had too.

Then the flap on the first tent went back and Jamie came out, and somebody came out after him.

Karen had been giving me pieces of it all afternoon. Not in any order. She had been up at the tent with Glenda for an hour or more while I was out with a peg, and my wife could not stand alongside another human being that long without their entire life coming out of them, and she had been handing bits of it to me ever since — over a hole in the ground, on the walk back, low, in the flat voice she kept for repeating something she was not sure she believed.

That Jamie had a son. That the son's name was Joel and he was nineteen. That there had been an accident, and then that it had not been an accident. That Glenda had stitched something. That they had found him in the river.

In the river.

And the last piece, which she gave me on the bank with her eyes on the water and not on me, and which I had put straight into the drawer I keep for other people's arithmetic: that Jamie had taken the boy down to a lagoon somewhere, and that he had gone in dead and come out not.

I had made a small noise at that. Not a laugh. Enough to let her know I had heard it and was not going to make her defend it.

Because a person did not come back. Whatever had happened to that boy, somebody had got their timings wrong, and somebody else had been frightened enough to believe it, and by the time it had gone round a camp of five people twice it had become the version she was telling me. I had watched a story do exactly that at a Collective meeting about a wombat.

So I had the whole of it filed and sorted before dinner. And then Joel came out of that tent and stood up straight in the firelight, and I got a proper look at his throat.

It went the whole way across. Not a nick and not a graze — a line running from under one ear round the front of his neck and away toward the other, closed with black stitches, big ones, spaced wide, put in fast by somebody working with what they had rather than with any interest in how it would look afterwards. The skin either side of it had gone yellow at the edges and purple-brown in the middle, in bands. There was a shine across the whole of it where something had been put on.

Nineteen years old.

I did not look away quickly enough, and I know I did not, and he saw me not doing it, and he sat down beside his father with nothing on his face at all.

I sat on my log and rearranged the entire afternoon.

Because I had spent it building a beautiful piece of reasoning on a rock. Distance from the watercourse, depth of cover, position relative to flow. A boy with a fever, a doctor talking about water, five hundred metres of river and a slope and a flow rate. I had put the whole of it together out of a smell and a scatter of stones and half a sentence I overheard, and I had been so pleased with the shape of it that I had walked home with my jaw set, working out how I was going to break it to five strangers that they had been killing themselves and had not noticed.

Somebody had cut that boy's throat.

Nobody had said so. Nobody had said one word about it, and I had not asked one question, and I had built a model out of the space where the questions should have gone and then admired it.

And the other one arrived about four seconds behind that, and it went through me a good deal colder.

They found him in the river.

I had lain down on my belly at the edge of that river with my face in the water and drunk out of it until my teeth ached.

I sat very still on that log for a while.

The latrine was still wrong. Ten metres from the water and five hundred metres above the camp is wrong in any world, and it would still want moving, and I would still say so. But I had come in off that bank with it burning a hole in me, ready to stand up in front of the whole camp on my first night — and now I sat there across a fire from a nineteen-year-old with forty stitches in his neck, and could not for the life of me work out how to bring up the subject of the toilet.

So I did not. And I will not pretend that was a decision made for good reasons.

Luke was standing in front of Karen with a plastic container in his hand.

I had not seen him arrive. There had been no ute and no shouting and nobody had got up, and at some point between the log going on the fire and Joel coming out of that tent, the man had simply been among us — and not one person there had remarked on it. Which told me they had stopped finding it remarkable, and that they had stopped finding it remarkable inside of a week.

Karen had explained that part as well, up at the tent, in about two sentences, because to her it was already settled. He comes and he goes. He is the only one who can. He goes back for things and he brings them through.

He had brought us dinner.

The containers were the black plastic ones with the clear lids that a takeaway comes in, half a dozen of them stacked along his forearm, and they were hot. Hot. Somebody had cooked that on a gas ring under an extraction fan, and put it into a bag, and handed it across a counter — and the whole of that had happened on the other side of a hole in a wall between then and now.

"Chicken tikka?" he said, and held one out to her.

Karen's whole face came up. "How did you know?"

"Lucky guess."

He gave her the grin with it and came along the log toward me.

And there he was.

I had met that man once, on a bus, in the spring, for about eleven minutes, and I could not have picked him out of two people in a supermarket. Then a wall in the back of my own house had opened up and taken my wife through it and me after her, and I had stood in the dust of another world and shouted his name at a translucent barrier because Karen told me to — and then shouted a great deal worse about him at a woman I had known twenty minutes. It's Luke's fault. I had said it at the top of my voice with my heart going and I had meant every letter of it.

And then I had sat in that same dust in front of four strangers and said, out loud, that I trusted him. Which was a lie I swerved into because the truth was coming up my throat and I had to put something in front of it.

And on a rock beside that river, something inside my own head had told me to go and find a mountain with six peaks on it, and had told me who it was for.

For Luke.

He stopped in front of me with a container in his hand and looked at me properly, and it was not a glance. He looked at my face rather than at me, and took his time over it, and his head came down a fraction and stayed there.

"And for you–"

"He'll eat anything," Karen said, from beside me, with her lid already off.

Luke's eyebrow went up half a centimetre and stayed up, and he did not take his eyes off me, and he waited.

I had more to say to that man than to any living person. A question about a doorway. A question about whatever he had used to open it. A question about why he had gone off and left the two of us standing in a desert. And underneath the lot of it, a mountain with six peaks on it that I had been told to keep to myself and had been carrying about since the middle of the afternoon.

"Anything is fine," I said.

"Sure."

He put the container into my hands and went on round the fire.

"Lois, sit!" Glenda's golden retriever had come round the circle at Luke's heels and had no intention of sitting anywhere. "Lois, sit!"

"Look, Lois, even Duke has settled," Jamie said, and put a hand out at the little Shih Tzu, who had folded himself up between Jamie's boots and Joel's and gone to sleep in among the four of them.

"And butter chicken for you." Luke handed the next one along.

"Thanks–"

I let the rest of it go past me.

The container was warm right through the plastic and against my palms, and my hands were in a state that sent the warmth straight into the blisters, and my stomach put in a noise loud enough that Karen turned her head.

I had eaten a duck egg omelette in my own kitchen that morning, standing at the bench with mud drying on my knees, and I had done a barrow of gravel and a retaining wall and a walk in from the portal and three hours with a tent peg since. I got the lid off and did not wait for anybody.

Rice and chicken, and it was too hot, and I did not care. I put it away in about four minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it I felt the two coins shift against my thigh as I leaned forward, and my free hand went down over the pocket without being asked.

Somebody put a bottle of water into my hand and I looked at the label on it and had to stop for a second. An ordinary Australian supermarket label with a barcode on it, and a use-by date printed on the shoulder in dot matrix, sitting in my fist in a place with no birds in it.

Then I did the sum I always did, which was the one nobody had ever thanked me for. Six people. However many bottles. However often he chose to come. And a river we could not drink out of, with a scatter of shit ten metres above it and a boy who had been floating in it.

I put that away too and drank the whole bottle.

Paul cleared his throat, loudly. He had been waiting on a gap and had decided to open one himself.

"I need everyone to check in at the Drop Zone regularly to see whether Luke has brought any of your belongings. Or perhaps there might be something there that you find you need."

"That sounds reasonable enough," I said, mostly into the container.

Which it was. A pile of gear sitting on open ground with nobody responsible for it and nobody keeping a list. I had seen it from the top of a dune on the way in and had known from three hundred metres off that nobody had organised it, and being told that everybody ought to go and look through it now and again was the closest anybody had come to a system all day.

"Reasonable?"

Karen's head came round at me and her eyes were hard.

"It's a long way to walk just to check. I'm too busy to wander over to simply... check."

I looked at her with a forkful halfway up.

That was not her. My wife had walked four kilometres in the rain to look under a log. She had stood in a council chamber for three hours to deliver ninety seconds about a drain. Whatever else anybody had ever accused Karen Owen of, nobody had ever got away with calling her unwilling to go and look at something.

She had been up since before light. She had been through a wall in her own house. She had put up a ten-man tent with a stranger, and knelt in the dirt for hours, and walked six hundred metres up a riverbank and six hundred back, and she was fifty-seven years old, and she had not sat down once between breakfast and that log.

I did not say any of that either. I put the fork in my mouth.

"I'm with Karen on this one," Jamie said, straight in behind her. "Too busy."

"Busy!" Paul had it out before Jamie had finished. "All you've done is sit in the tent for the past two days!"

"Fuck off, Paul!"

Jamie came half up off the log and a piece of chicken went off his fork and landed in his lap and stayed there, and nobody moved to pick it up, and for about two seconds the only sound anywhere was the fire.

I kept my head down over my food.

Which I would like to say was tact.

It was not tact. Two men who had been shut in a tent together for four days were having it out in front of everybody about who had done what, and I had been in that camp less than a day, and I had not the first idea what either of them had been through, and the safest place in the world was the bottom of a plastic container. So that is where I looked.

Except that I had just seen what was stitched across that boy's neck. And Jamie had spent the last two days in a tent with him.

"Didn't you want to be responsible for managing the Drop Zone anyway?" Luke said, from off to the side, in the mildest voice in the circle.

And I heard myself say it before I had decided anything.

"I'm happy to wander over. It'll be a nice break and good to see what's there."

Then I put another forkful in, quickly, to shut myself up.

It was true enough. A walk out to the Drop Zone was several hundred metres of ground I had not yet put a hole in, and if I was going out there on an errand then I had a reason to be out there that nobody would ask me twice about.

That was not why I said it. I said it because two men were shouting across a fire on my first night and somebody had to put something ordinary down in the middle of it, and I would rather volunteer for a chore than sit through another four seconds of that.

"You make a good Drop Zone manager," Glenda said to Paul.

"Well, he is shit at building things," Kain said, not quite under his breath.

Which was neither fair nor true. I had put up a ten-man ridge frame with that man that afternoon and he had been steady and quick and had done what he was told without needing it said twice, and there are not a great many I would say that about. I did not correct it. Whatever Kain was — twenty-two, twenty-three — he was family in there, and it was not my circle to be reaching into on the first night.

"I think our settlement has more chance of thriving if we each focus on our own strengths," Glenda said.

She put it into the gap smoothly, and it went straight over the top of Kain's remark and buried it, and I watched her do it and thought that whatever else she was, she had done that before. Nobody talked like that unless they had spent years in rooms where somebody had to.

"With Luke bringing supplies through so quickly now, perhaps it would be best if the Drop Zone had a dedicated manager."

"Fine." Paul let a breath go. "I'll be responsible for notifying people when things arrive for them and for keeping the Drop Zone in some sort of order."

"Marvellous," said Karen, brightly, and I did not look at her.

"But," Paul said, and stopped, and let it sit there. "If I am going to be going back and forth so often, we need to do something about this bloody dust! We need to build a road."

"That sounds fair enough," Glenda said, and got a hand down onto Lois to settle her.

My hand went up.

"I can help with that."

It went up before I had thought about it, and I had thought about it a great deal.

Because a road was a cut. A road across that country meant stripping the loose material off and breaking the crust and getting down onto something that would carry a wheel — which meant several hundred metres of open profile, in a straight line, from the camp out to the Drop Zone, with every layer of it standing exposed in the side of the cut where a man could walk the length of it and read the whole sequence off as he went.

I had been given four seconds' notice of the best trench I was ever going to get, and my hand was in the air before the sentence was finished, and I did not say one word about why.

"Yeah, I guess we could all pitch in," Kain said.

"I'll help too."

It came from across the fire and it was barely a voice at all — hauled up out of a throat that somebody had opened and somebody else had sewn shut, and it stopped twice on the way.

Everybody let it be and got on with the evening, and I sat on my log with an empty container and looked at a young man who had got four words out with forty stitches in his neck.

Nobody in that circle had told us one true thing about him all day. They had told us he was not well. They had told us he wanted a few days' rest.

And I had two coins in my pocket that nobody knew about, and a mountain with six peaks on it that nobody was ever going to know about, and a latrine ten metres from the water that I had decided not to raise.

So I was in no position whatever to be aggrieved about any of it. I sat there and was aggrieved about it anyway, and it took me a good while to work out that what I actually felt was left out.